The San Francisco calamity by earthquake and fire eBook

“Until the year 1883 few had ever heard of Krakatoa.
It was unknown to fame, as are hundreds of other gems
of glorious vegetation set in tropical waters.
It was not inhabited, but the natives from the surrounding
shores of Sumatra and Java used occasionally to draw
their canoes up on its beach, while they roamed through
the jungle in search of the wild fruits that there
abounded. It was known to the mariner who navigated
the Straits of Sunda, for it was marked on his charts
as one of the perils of the intricate navigation in
those waters. It was no doubt recorded that the
locality had been once, or more than once, the seat
of an active volcano. In fact, the island seemed
to owe its existence to some frightful eruption of
by-gone days; but for a couple of centuries there
had been no fresh outbreak. It almost seemed as
if Krakatoa might be regarded as a volcano that had
become extinct. In this respect it would only
be like many other similar objects all over the globe,
or like the countless extinct volcanoes all over the
moon.

“As the summer of 1883 advanced the vigor of
Krakatoa, which had sprung into notoriety at the beginning
of the year, steadily increased and the noises became
more and more vehement; these were presently audible
on shores ten miles distant, and then twenty miles
distant; and still those noises waxed louder and louder,
until the great thunders of the volcano, now so rapidly
developing, astonished the inhabitants that dwelt over
an area at least as large as Great Britain. And
there were other symptoms of the approaching catastrophe.
With each successive convulsion a quantity of fine
dust was projected aloft into the clouds. The
wind could not carry this dust away as rapidly as
it was hurled upward by Krakatoa, and accordingly
the atmosphere became heavily charged with suspended
particles.

“A pall of darkness thus hung over the adjoining
seas and islands. Such was the thickness and
density of these atmospheric volumes of Krakatoa dust
that, for a hundred miles around, the darkness of midnight
prevailed at midday. Then the awful tragedy of
Krakatoa took place. Many thousands of the unfortunate
inhabitants of the adjacent shores of Sumatra and
Java were destined never to behold the sun again.
They were presently swept away to destruction in an
invasion of the shore by the tremendous waves with
which the seas surrounding Krakatoa were agitated.

“As the days of August passed by the spasms
of Krakatoa waxed more and more vehement. By
the middle of that month the panic was widespread,
for the supreme catastrophe was at hand. On the
night of Sunday, August 26, 1883, the blackness of
the dust-clouds, now much thicker than ever in the
Straits of Sunda and adjacent parts of Sumatra and
Java, was only occasionally illumined by lurid flashes
from the volcano.